Why not? Figuring out DB access, session storage, i18n, etc. is not core to my business. Why not abstract that into a framework, and let engineers focus on solving their business needs?
Most of the things you mention are already solved in several useful and applicable to different situations methods in JS anyhow.
Mega-frameworks are, in my experience, one of the biggest sources of encouraging Bad Practices just because their the favorite idiom of the developers.
Rails is infamous for this.
Node (and JavaScript) already has a big enough problem encouraging good code practices that a Rails framework would do untold damage.
The closest it has now is Express (obviously not the same) and that’s already pretty bad for doing what I mention (vastly superseded by Koa and Hapi anyhow).
These things create a very dangerously myopic gravity.
The micro module route Node, JS , and npm uses is - I feel - much much more flexible and beneficial long term.
Bingo! I've seen things go wrong with Backbone. The lack of opinion is great if you have an experienced developer starting the project and defining the filesystem layout and overall architecture. We, unfortunately, did not have that for our marketing site. I actively avoid working on our marketing site for this very reason.
